ITALY’S QUEEN

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21304, 25 March 1939, Page 11

ITALY’S QUEEN

AN ELUSIVE FIGURE In spite of the romance of royalty, and in spite, too, of the prominence of all things Italian in the public eye today, Elena of Italy still remains the most elusive figure among Europe's royal women, and by her own choice. Yet Queen Elena’s personality and character have a unique interest, and she has had a more romantic upbringing than any other queen of modern times. Born a princess of the little kingdom of Montenegro, her palace home was nothing more pretentious than a big, comfortable, country villa in Cetinje, where her chieftain father would hold court in the shade of a tree in the garden, sitting in judgment there on disputes brought for his royal settlement. The young princess's beauty enslaved the King of Italy, who must have seen further into the character of his bride than did, at first, the court circle in Rome, who were disappointed by her lack of conventionality and her dislike of pomp. When the great earthquake of Messina occurred she was one of the first on the spot. She tended the sick and dying with devoted care. Nursing and social work have always been her chief interests, and she has done an enormous amount toward raising the prestige of the nursing profession—always low in Latin countries—and toward helping to substitute the splendid new hospitals of modern Italy for the ramshackle organisations she first found there. An instance of her generous practicality was her gesture when coral went out of fashion and the coral fishers of Naples were threatened with ruin. For the first—and only—time she deliberately set out to launch a fashion, wearing her corals continually. Of course, all feminine Rome followed . b —and the fisher families were saved.